Marco Roth: Teaching Rails to Read Its Own Template

Robby Russell (0:04)

Welcome to On Rails. This is the podcast where we dig into the technical decisions by building and maintaining production Ruby on Rails apps. And I'm your host, Robby Russell. And I run Planet Argon. For over 21 years, we've helped teams maintain and involve their long lived Rails apps. So I tend to approach these conversations through that lens. In this episode, I'm joined by Marco Roth. Marco is the creator of ERB, a parser and a set of tools that understands HTML and ERB together.

He also created ReActionView, which helps build on ERB to make Rails views more reactive. He's a long time contributor to the Hotwire ecosystem. He was also named the 2025 Rails Luminary, and he maintains rubyevents.org with several number of people on the team. We're going to dig into how ERB works and how it became part of Rails. It could be part of the default at 8.2. We'll talk about what that means for your existing Rails apps, and we're going to explore how Marco makes time in his schedule for this type of work, and what he's working on next. Marco joins us from Basel, Switzerland. All right, check for your belongings.

All aboard.

Marco Roth, welcome to you On Rails.

Marco Roth (1:07)

Thank you for having me, Robby.

Robby Russell (1:09)

So Marco, let's start with this. What keeps you on Rails?

Marco Roth (1:14)

Yeah, that's a good question. There's a lot of things that keep me on Rails. A lot of things have to do with the community and the people in the community that have been super helpful over the last few years.

I myself started, as I was learning, programming as well, and there was a lot of people that helped me get started, helped me get good with it. And in a way, it's for me to just give back to these people that helped me get into this. So for me, it's a way to kind of appreciate these people and also try to help get more people on Rails so we can have a more vibrant community.

Robby Russell (1:49)

Do you just think of yourself as a Rails developer first and foremost, versus like MS, web developer, software developer?

Marco Roth (1:58)

Yeah, I would say so. I think I would consider myself a full-stack Rails engineer that in the last few years has been more focused on the more foundational, developable experience side of things. So I try to get more into the lower level things, more foundational pieces like the frameworks. And now with Herb, also some more of the developer experience and for the tools, for editor tooling, linters, formatters, that kind of stuff. So I just try to build the experience I want to see myself as a full-stack engineer working on Rails.

Robby Russell (2:31)

Sure. I was doing a little bit of digging up and at least browsing your LinkedIn, and I saw that you had maybe a brief stint, or I think it was maybe more than a year of being a teacher at one of the coding schools.

Marco Roth (2:45)

Yeah, exactly. I was working at L'Evagon for, or working as a coach there for a few courses, mainly because they were big on Rails. Maybe they're still auditing, I'm not quite sure, but they were big on Rails. They helped a lot of people get into Rails, and one of the last curriculums, they also added the whole Hotwire stack and stimulus to it.

They had a branch here in Switzerland in Zurich, and I knew some of the people working there, and they asked me if I wanted to come on to teach some of these classes that were concerned with the JavaScript side of things. So I was lucky and happy to teach some people the Hotwire stack to new engineers.

Robby Russell (3:26)

Did you have much of a background in coaching or teaching prior to that?

Marco Roth (3:31)

I mean, not formally. I was in school myself, so I kind of saw some of the things there. I was helping out with some of the classes to help people get up to speed and help them with exercises. And I have been that person in my kind of class for my classmates sometimes too. So I kind of got that angle and that feels, I feel like a bit more personal than it is from this teacher perspective, kind of talking down to people. It's more that you sit together and have this pair programming experience, which I think is more helpful. And also how I got taught to program and to learn Rails.

Robby Russell (4:06)

I've done a lot of pair programming with employees and interns over the years of my company, but now I think back to like my first job as a software developer, I was sitting there next to a senior developer and they were like walking me through things like, well, here's how we make changes, here's how this stuff works, here's how we call SQL. This was way before I was using Ruby or Ruby on Rails. But I always think that's how I learned to, was like working with other people and like looking at reading stuff online. And I'm kind of curious about your role. And we'll talk about, there's a bunch of topics I want to get into with you today, but I think there's an interesting connection there. Like, do you feel like because you've had that experience of learning to program that way and then being able to help coach and mentor other people in a similar way, that gravitates to you, like seeing how other people will use and interact with things that you want to make things easier for them, that tends to be a trend that shows up in some of the projects they're working on. And you think a lot about developer experience because you're watching other people interact with it versus like if it was just you having to like brute force figure out how to make things work, that kind of shines a light on like oh, I want to make things better for other people because you see it in other people.